Mexico Has No Right To Call America Racist. They Are One Of the Most Racist Countries on Earth.

Mexico has no right to call America racist. It's still one of the most racist countries on earth.

No honest Mexican can deny the fact of Mexican racism; multiple studies confirm that beyond any doubt. Racial differences heavily influence Mexican society. Racism in Mexico, both against blacks and dark-skinned indigenous Indians, has a long history. Mexico's colonial past has left its mark on modern-day society. Prejudice toward "pure-blood" Indians from those who are "mixed-blood" (Spanish and Indian) is rife. Almost uniformly, people who are darker-skinned and of Indian descent make up the peasantry and working classes, while lighter-skinned, Spanish-descent Mexicans are in the ruling elite.

It was the Spanish slave trade that first brought Africans to Mexico, as early as 1520. The Spanish crown soon expanded the practice into a full-blown slave trade. The population of blacks grew to outnumber the Spanish and eventually reached 200,000. With Mexico's independence in 1829, slavery was finally abolished after almost 300 years. But slavery had taken its toll on the remnants of African culture, and intermarriage with indigenous people, and to a lesser extent with the Spanish, created a population of mixed-bloods, or mulattos. The descendants of these people continued to intermarry, which may be why the contemporary Afro-Mexican population is relatively small.

Ten percent of Mexico is “gachupine” (gah-choo-pee-neh), which is loosely translated as “white” — an Aztec word meaning "a man wearing shoes with pins," or spurs. There were no horses in the Western Hemisphere when the Spanish arrived, so there were no spurs. Sixty percent of Mexico is mixed Indian and white, and 30 percent pure Amerindian.

Between 1519 and 1821, when the Spanish ran Mexico, racial codes organized the Spanish Western Hemisphere into more than a dozen different racial classifications starting with those born in Spain, the Peninsulares; they were No. 1. Their children born in the New World, the Criollos, were No. 2; No. 3 was the part-Spanish, part-Indian, the mestizo. The penultimate category was the Zamba, half-black and half-Indian. Last was the 100 percent Indian, or Indio.

The only people who could own land and conduct government affairs were in the No. 1 and No. 2 classifications; there was no voting as Spain was a monarchy, not a democracy.

No wonder, then, that a fed-up Catholic priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, enamored with American independence and democratic government, loudly pronounced “Death to bad government, death to the gachupines!” to his parishioners at midnight, Sept. 16, 1810; the churchgoers rushed out and attacked Spanish-owned businesses and government property, starting more than 10 years of war for independence.

In retrospect, his followers included mestizos and Indians who were fed up with the overt racism imposed by the Spanish-born and their children on them and on Africans whom Spain brought to Mexico as slaves. Father Hidalgo was himself a “criollo” without a drop of Indian blood.

One view of modern Mexico is that the racial society Father Hidalgo detested still exists, though it is not official policy, as it was when Hidalgo rebelled.

In 1954, then-U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues on the Supreme Court included in their landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, ruling against “separate but equal” schools, the results of a study that measured black children choosing white dolls over black dolls because the white dolls were considered prettier and nicer.

A similar doll study was done in Mexico a few years ago. It found that Mexican children of all colors chose white dolls for the same reason that American black children chose white dolls over black dolls almost 70 years ago in the United States.

Racism in Mexico is not news to Mexicans. The Mexican National Council to Prevent Discrimination has done a study that shows 20 percent of Mexicans are uncomfortable with the color of their skin; 25 percent say they have been discriminated against because of their “appearance,” 55 percent recognized that there is discrimination based on skin color; and 23 percent admit they would not want to live with a person of a different race or culture.

In a similar study in 2016, the National Autonomous University asked whether skin color influenced the way people are treated; 51 percent of respondents answered yes, with 33.4 percent replying yes, in part.

Among the study's respondents, 72 percent agreed that racism exists in Mexico and 47 percent said Indians (and at least 68 Indian dialects are spoken in Mexico) don’t have the same job opportunities as other Mexicans.